Creation by Greg Chase Read Free Book Online

staged.
    “Yep, but what exactly are you showing me?” Dr. Shot asked.
    Sam didn’t see how this was possible. People lived one hundred years, but never after they’d already earned a PhD. He’d been in a vegetative state in the pod for too long. His mind was playing tricks. “Central nervous cord, maybe one third the way from head to tail, molecular level.” He was even sounding like XG.
    The man on the screen put on reading glasses. Sam had only seen magnifying-glass lenses in museums as a kid. Now he knew he was in a dream. The old man harrumphed in disgust. “Military override? Leviathan , right?” He began pressing buttons on some hidden screen.
    “Yeah, on both questions.” Sam heard stories—rumors really—of people living longer on some of the outlying planets. Confirmation of such a place would likely create a whole new migration to some small moon named The Fountain of Youth. But for this guy to be the one and only designer, Sam estimated he’d have to be pushing one hundred forty at the youngest. That wasn’t an age Sam wanted to contemplate.
    “Okay, got it. That was one of the energy-vortex models.” Again, the old man gave a look of disgust as he shook his head. “If you’re inside that thing, I’m going to assume you’re somewhere out along the Kuiper Belt. And as such, you probably don’t have a way home unless you can convince it to power up.”
    “You nailed it, but I don’t think convincing is going to do it.” Sam would’ve scratched his head, but having his body restrained one way or another was becoming a bad habit. “Unless you’re saying there’s a backup system.”
    Dr. Shot chuckled. “Of course there’s a backup system. But it must believe there’s not enough power for the job.”
    Sam could see a certain similarity between the doctor and XG. “You’re giving this computer a lot of credit. Believe? Convince? ”
    “I designed that whole energy vortex to work like the human brain. All energy, you understand? No wires, no optic cable, not even wireless communication. Pure energy firing between synapses. Except the military couldn’t control that, so they shorted out massive areas. Not intentionally—you’d have to know what you were doing for it to be intentional. But the result was the same.”
    “So what do I do? How do I get this”—Sam stopped himself from calling it junk —“ship back home?”
    “By connecting to the XG, you can use your own brain function as a blueprint for the missing section. In your state of suspended animation, she can map a small section of your frontal lobe. The build pod is equipped with magnetic micro tools. You understand you can’t exactly go in there with microscopic tweezers? Yeah, well, these laser-like magnets can manipulate the cord material back into the operational threads even at a molecular level.”
    “And once that’s done?” asked Sam. “I mean, these computers took massive amounts of energy to start up. What good is this going to do me out here in this energy wasteland?”
    Dr. Shot glared from the view screen. “Don’t believe everything you read. Once it’s all in place, that ship can power up from the breeze off a fruit fly’s wings.”
    Sam looked hard into the deep-blue eyes on the screen. “One last question before you go. Am I really talking to Dr. Shot?”
    “You mean how can I be still kicking around and answering questions after a hundred and thirty nine years? Get back alive, and we’ll talk.”
    Wrinkles spread from the bald head down to the eyes as he squinted at some piece of information. “Something interesting about Leviathan . We built openings along the core into the transport pods. Not something we wanted anyone to know. You don’t want some kid opening a long-lost hatch and flooding their living space with electricity. Can’t even see the openings from the pods. But if you get stuck, there is an escape. Trust me, you don’t want to be in that builder’s coffin once the